…when you’re reading TTAG at work with a Ruger thermos pouring coffee into a coffee cup with a Walther PPK handle and a Gun Digest daily calendar staring back at you (today’s Gun of the Day: the Ruger Super Redhawk in .454 Casull/.45 Colt).

The right monitor is for work, the left is for knowlege.
You DO know how many rifles you have due to the cartridges on your office desk. (tried to attach a photo here).
Your office is a mile from Tri-County gun club and you get to hear the sound of freedom all day.
You have a boat gun, a truck gun, a house gun, a bedroom gun, a garage gun, a den gun…
You have holsters for guns you don’t own anymore.
when you hear “lands and grooves” in a coffee shop, you smile.
And last, you auditioned for “Top Shot” cause those jack wagons on the show can’t hit squat.

“No sweetie, see, I’m a gun enthusiast. It’s different. Gun nuts want an AR, a Glock, a gazillion rounds and a hole to hide it in. I, on the other hand, am a collector with the goal of covering the caliber spectrum. That’s why I need 15 guns and a gun nut needs two. See how much sense that makes?

What do you mean ‘doghouse’? He’s already sleeping in there. I don’t even think I’ll fit!”

You know you’re a gun nut when you complain about your local sheriff selling carry permits under the table at a county board of supervisors meeting, a local reporter interviews you, does a story in the paper about your documentation on this and the headline in the paper reads, I kid you not:

CT at one time had the same local PD requirement. Over a matter of years and with a ton of evidence showing the abuse, a democratically controlled legislature changed the laws versus having it go to court. Now the local PD has 12 weeks (used to be 8 weeks) to do a background check. If they fail to respond, it is considered automatic approval. If they do respond, they must give reason and you can take it to a firearms board who has been very very fair about the rejections. To the point it angers the local PD. Unfortunately now the local PD has a single appeal. But, what we have now is still better than before when the top cop had 100% approval power.

“May issue” is bullsh!t. Contributions to Sheriff Baca clearly have an impact on being “rewarded” with a CC permit. I think the next thing to be banned should be “May issue,” to be immediately replaced with “Shall issue.”

Wow. That was quite an interesting read. I especially liked the part where the deputy told the suspect that he couldn’t “handle things” with a phone call to the Sheriff because it was a citizen’s arrest.

You are watching a movie or tv show and every time a firearm appears on screen, all heads immediately look to you for a quick ID, round capacity, performance and reliability report, and background history of vintage weapons so they don’t have to look it up. Then you go into a 5 minute long rant explaining why Hollywood has it’s collective head up it’s rectal cavity because “REAL guns just don’t do that!”

Also, pointing out when a 6 shot revolver is fired 9-10 times without reloading. I guess only really awesome Hollywood actors and Jason Bourne types can do that, ’cause I can only get 6 shots out of a six shot revolver without stopping to reload. I’m also curious how to cram 327 rounds into 30 round magazine.

I read a comment once about how Bruce Willis in Last Man Standing had “belt-fed .45’s” that’s stuck with me ever since. To this day I can’t watch even one scene of that movie without feeling compelled to count rounds between reloads. 🙂

My wife’s lament! We adore zombie films, however she is sick to death of me constantly analyzing performance, capacity, ect on the firearms used. I’m still of a mind that repetitive rifle shots to the pelvic region should register a ‘mobility’ kill. Also, in a land without laws or guards, the M2 Cal. .50 MG seems like a reasonable addition to any vehicle. A basic understanding of ballistics and physiology suggests that head shots aren’t necessary with such a weapon, as broken bones, spinal cord damage and wrecked muscles would incapacitate even those who do not experience pain or shock. . . wait, I think I might be a gun nut . . .

Your circle of people send their circle of people to you to help identify something their late uncle Harry had in a footlocker in the basement. This has happened to me more than once.

And people know I’m the gun guy so they come to me with questions and they bring me stuff that was in a late relatives house. I’ve been given stray boxes of ammo cause they didn’t want to throw it in the trash.

And for some reason people like to bring and show me the bayonets that their older generation brought back as souvenirs.

Related: last time I visited my friend’s family ranch in Ukiah to do some camping, hunting and recreational shooting with the offspring, the owner had two random intact hunting-rifle cartridges that she wanted me to dispose of. They were dropped by hunters on her land, and she didn’t have any guns chambered for that ammo.

I smiled, nodded, accepted them with good grace… all the while thinking “WTF? Do I give people the impression that I’m an ordnance disposal expert or something?”

This is not the first time this has happened. To be fair, it’s not like CA recycling centers publish instructions for disposing of unwanted ammo…

Check out a Brit movie called “Hot Fuzz”. It’s a great send up of the action-adventure and horror genres. The inside joke, though, is that some gun nut, or nuts, had a hoot making this movie. Every time a gun appears on the screen (about every three seconds) it’s something older, rarer, and stranger than the last. In the course of the last half hour or so I saw: an SMLE, Enfield and Webley revolvers, a brace of Spiller & Burr cap and ball revolvers, an ancient Dutch blunderbuss, a Tommy Gun, a Webley-Fosbery automatic revolver, an FN Highpower, several 1911’s, an AR-15, an AK-47, a BAR, a Colt SAA, an M-1 carbine, and I don’t know what all else. Great fun!

I still remember the first time I attempted to watch “Shooter” with Mark Wahlberg as the sniper. For those who havent seen the movie, the opening scene is Wahlberg and his spotter covering the retreat of friendly forces.
1. Wahlberg had a Barrett M82 and a bolt action rifle. I have no knowledge on this, but it seemed strange that he would ruck in an extra 10lbs by carrying another rifle.
2. Wahlberg takes a shot with the Barrett and then cycles the bolt manually on a semi-auto rifle.
…and then I cut the movie off. I have gone back and watched it since, the movie is riddled with inaccuracies.

… you make every vacation gun related, whether training, fun shooting, etc. And if the destination is “non permissive” bringing along gun magazines, books and trying to find fellow shooters to talk to.

You know your a gun nut when your wife tells you she can’t start dinner until you clean the gun parts off the kitchen table and the smell of Hoppe’s #9 out of the sink. You instead tell her that you can’t be stopped in the middle of your work and offer to buy takeout instead.

You know you’re a gun nut when the action type on your carry gun isn’t even a standard term like “revolver” or “semi-auto”. Instead it’s “magazine fed revolver with gas-powered shell ejection”…also known as “Maurice the FrankenRuger”…

Maurice was built in a “Hackerspace” called “Xerocraft” in Tucson where I had access to an 11″ Logan Lathe from about 1950 complete with busted reverse gear and a Bridgeport-type mill.

The sight is a relative of the Goshen Hexsite, a target-focused iron sight. It’s using a concept Tim Sheehan at Goshen hasn’t put into production yet…he let me hand-build my own prototype. Can’t talk about how it works or take a pic of the sight alignment.

YOU know you are a gun nut when you go to the range and have brass (reloads) flying everywhere and every one else only shoots 1 or 2 boxes and leaves , and you pickup all the brass and ammo boxes to reload again…and get the weather reports so you can shoot in no rain….Ha. Ha. and tell the wife how important it is to test all this ammo……

When you tell your wife you don’t have money to throw her a birthday party but come home the next day with a new rifle. When she tells you she’s pregnant, find out if it’s a boy or girl, and go get a cricket and ear miffs right after the sonogram. When you buy ammunition for a gun you MIGHT be able to buy in a year or two. When you pay off a credit card, then realize you have enough of a balance to get another gun.

When you jump out of your seat at the Miranda Lambert concert to applaud the awesome Girls with Guns video on the Jumbotron that introduces the singer. It’s a montage of female movie characters wielding firearms through the years–very unpolitically correct.

Related: when you report directly to the CEO of your company, and at the executive staff meetings he occasionally makes horribly bad gun-use analogies in an attempt to be inclusive. “See, what we have is a pair of revolvers stuck in our holsters shooting at our feet, and what we need is semi-autos blazing away at the target…”

YKYAAGN when:
You use your DVR to stop the movie to ID a gun and when in doubt, go to the Movie Firearms Data Base site on your IPad and use it as a guide during the rest of the movie.
You nevever have to stop on a 92FS because even your wife can ID those.

Wife walks up and catches you staring at your open gun safe. She asks if there is a problem. You-Yes, I have no more room in my safe. She-what do we need to do about that (she is thinking YES he going to get rid of some of them)? You-I need a bigger safe. She-what are you going to with that one trade it in? You-No, just get another bigger safe. She-Why? You-To better categorize and room for more guns. She rolls her eyes and walks off mumbling something to herself. You didn’t get a direct ‘NO WAY’ so your good to go.

…when you have asked jewelry makers and engravers how they can assist you in jewelry and style needs directly connected to wearing gun parts. Or your girlfriend tells you that she won’t sew ammo loops on your jeans as a fashion statement.

Related: when you find yourself in a hopeless dilemma trying to choose between a nice red-dot and a flip-to-side magnifier vs. an good quality 1-4X illuminated scope… and your significant other is getting pissy because Father’s Day is coming up and you can’t tell her what you want.

You type ‘t’ into the address bar of any of your several different browsers on multiple devices (laptop, 2 phones, iPad) and after a single character it autocompletes to http://www.thetruthaboutguns.com

You know you’re a gun nut when someone asks you where the 3-hole punch is and you say, “I’m not allowed to have select fire weapons ’cause the Man is always getting me down. I have a one-hole punch in my belt if you’d like to use that.”